Vladivostok. Power over the East, the city’s name meant in Russian. And yet for Tolstoy, the East had power over him. The East had rendered melancholy his temper on those gray November mornings in Austin when he wandered the streets and the hills. The East had instilled him with the burning, Faustian energy to conquer the indolence inside him and strive onward. It had given him the fire in his eyes to accomplish his destiny, the sweet taste of simplicity on his lips and an honest ruddiness to his hands. And this East had exerted its power over him in the distant West of Texas, had drawn him in, back to his past, onwards toward his end. A year and six months, the nights spent staring at the ceiling and at the shapes that the playful moon painted on it, thoughts on snow and on ancestors lost, pickles, beets, cabbage, honest food for honest folks, good food from the good earth (as the fast food jingle once went), the whinnies of horses and the hunting of smiling hares at daybreak, a life spent at ease in the endless and sun-stained fields, or in heavy contemplation on cool meanderings through the forest, pine needles crackling under handmade boots. Eighteen some odd months of fantasies, ancestral and geographic, rendered at last tangible on this day, the return home.
Tolstoy had imagined Vladivostok as a sleepy fishing settlement, a bunching of wooden houses on the bank of a softly flowing river, a port where well-mannered stevedores loaded grain onto noble old ships and whistled trepaks. He had expected to see fisherman asleep on the banks of quiet and ancient streams, wooden canes set up to snag the trout, gray and wise faces nestled serenely against the white bark of a birch. He imagined blonde girls running across the fields to their wooden cottages, hand in hand through the amber, their golden hair fanning out in the sea breeze and their freckled faces bright with smiles.
And yet these scenes evaded him during his first moments on Russian soil. There were noise levels here that he had never anticipated. There was bargaining, haggling, the angry shaking of fragile plastic wares and the wrenching of wrinkled chicken throats, the caressing of fish on public squares, baritone voices booming out the price of cabbage, the exchanging of worthless currencies on windy outdoor markets against an overcast sky.
Tolstoy tried not to admit his disappointment. He regretted the large billboards, the roads wider than any Austin freeway, the stench of cars that polluted more maliciously than any American SUV. The giggles of the pre-teen girls were just as shrill, the thrasonical boomings and shoulder-hunched grunts of pubescent males just as vulgar and pretentious as their American analogues. There was a scent in the air of Vladivostok that Tolstoy found cheap and corrosive. It was a curious cross between dollar store perfume and industrial waste. Loud and cheap sounds seemed to be slicing from all directions of the compass, even from the east.
Tolstoy wandered along the docks, sought consolation from the invasive noise and the shrill commercial colors in the view of the rich and endless blue of the Pacific. There were massive ships being loaded on the dock, palls of crusty coal smoke being pooped into the air, weapons systems sent off to banana republics, plutonium exports to landlocked desert countries (the ship was just a way of covering it all up). There were sailors, military men that looked like Popeye with anchor tattoos on their biceps, lounging about the docks, leaning against walls in uniform like in a black and white photo from the forties, cigarette resting serenely in their smiling mouths. Tolstoy approached their coterie and stood as close as possible without invading the intimacy of their marine agape. They were laughing about a popular Russian television personality, apparently some kind of stand-up comedian, and this disappointed Tolstoy. Sailors were supposed to talk in long and nostalgic sentences, as in a Conrad novel. They were supposed to sip whisky and exhale smoke in dim light, spin yarns of intrepid sea feats, shipwrecks averted, typhoons evaded, tsunamis suffocated.
Tolstoy walked away sadly. A sea gull took a nosedive and unleashed its capricious bowels, hit him on the nose with a smart bomb shit. He felt terminated, dirty, and used. Part of him wanted to jump into the water and drown.
He abandoned the idea of winding through Vladivostok on foot, looking on awestruck at the noble way of Russian life. There was no nobility in the palls of industrial ylem, nor in the garish trumpet sounds of motorcycle horns that split through his head like lightning bolts. And yet, Vladivostok had never been the goal, only a means to that end. He was, he had to admit, not much closer to Yasnaya Poliana and to his personal destiny here than he had been back in Austin.
So he bit his lip and made haste through the haze and the noise. The sun had begun to set behind the concrete blocks, and a stiff wind was blowing against his face. He mastered his surroundings, ignored the motorcycle growls, the lewdness of the women’s persiflage, the threats of the insane. And the patience paid off. In the dim light of a dying day, he could make out the letters, not yet awakened by neon charges. Vakzal. The train station. It was here that he would board the famous train and travel across Asia to Europe.
And so it was. A modest price was paid. Large bills were counted off to an eager, round-faced lady of Asiatic origins with a down-home smile that was uncannily Wisconsonian. A ticket was obtained that would send Tolstoy in monotonous juts across the unending pine forests of Siberia, a fortnight of train travel, interrupted only for long pisses in the thick morning fog in towns more remote than anyplace in Texas.
Ticket crumpled tight in his moist hand, Tolstoy loitered a bit in the train station. Vulture-faced police passed with large dogs and gave him a good sniff, the men that is. He wandered about, cast suspicious glances in all directions, feared retribution from the city that he did not want to accept. Hunger began to raise havoc inside his belly, and so he approached a blind man with a large spoon, something resembling chili spurting up in a pot, and wads of stale bread to pour his meaty sauces onto. He ordered this, something resembling a Sloppy Joe with an exotic, Finno-Ugric name. Peppery sauce squirted on his beard as he bit into the heaps of bread and flesh, chomping loudly and exhaling through the nose, and yet this eating was for the hunger that was coming.
Five hours later he was alone in his berth, a Russian newspaper folded over him like an uncomfortable blanket. Night had fallen and he could feel his body swaying gently to and fro as the train obediently ran its course. Tolstoy found it difficult to find sleep’s solace on this. Thick inside his chest, he felt his heart beating to curious rhythms. And there were the surges of pain, the intermittent spurts that hounded him when he feared them most. He tried reading his newspaper, running his eyes over the lines of Cyrillic. In working his eyes and trying to fix his concentration on the subject matter, namely the trivial happenings of Siberia’s lost villages, Tolstoy sought some consolation from the droning of death in his ears, that ringing that intensified the more he thought of it. In all of the matter-of-fact reporting of heroic schoolteachers battling blizzards to make literate her fellow village-dwellers, in all of the vivid accounts of slain wolves by eager, half-drunken and likely fully rabid hunters, Tolstoy could find little that eased his mind.
His mouth grew dry, painfully so. He found himself dreaming strange dreams, waking intermittently and feeling fragile, indeed intensely vulnerable in his berth. He sought to put a positive spin on things, to imagine in the rhythmic movements of the train the rocking of an infant’s cradle by a loving mother. He sought to reconstruct those moments he shared as an infant with Maria Ivanovna. He saw himself with her and traveling across the Atlantic on a steamer, from Petersburg to Havana. He tried to reconstruct in his mind the soft and inviting features of her face, the warm dimples and modest smile, the golden hair parted in the middle, the large blue eyes that reflected love and generosity.
He opened his eyes again and pressed his face to the window. He was somewhere in the unfathomable thickness, invisible to the light of civilization, and this idea brought solace to him. Tolstoy appreciated the idea that he was no longer relevant as an individual, that he had been subsumed by a blackness, veering through night in parts of the world that no one really knew, quietly onwards towards a final destination.
Throughout the two week journey across Siberia, day and night merged into a oneness for Tolstoy, a haziness of consciousness. His existence was now sliced up into a montage of images, alterations of darkness and light and states somewhere in between, drowsy states of semi-consciousness punctuated by flashes of unmitigated intellectual energy. The dreams that Tolstoy had assumed a greater pictorial resolution during the journey, like an upgraded computer program, and yet his perception of the exterior world became hazier. At times, he spent hour after hour staring out the train window, his sad, dark eyes submitting to the stream of green and red of the forests. And yet, as this stream pressed onward, Tolstoy began to sense time drawing to a halt, felt his heart slowing down, his breaths deeper and richer, a calmness setting in over his limbs and his mind, allaying his frantic fears. He had never felt so wise, so ready to die.
Tolstoy had imagined Vladivostok as a sleepy fishing settlement, a bunching of wooden houses on the bank of a softly flowing river, a port where well-mannered stevedores loaded grain onto noble old ships and whistled trepaks. He had expected to see fisherman asleep on the banks of quiet and ancient streams, wooden canes set up to snag the trout, gray and wise faces nestled serenely against the white bark of a birch. He imagined blonde girls running across the fields to their wooden cottages, hand in hand through the amber, their golden hair fanning out in the sea breeze and their freckled faces bright with smiles.
And yet these scenes evaded him during his first moments on Russian soil. There were noise levels here that he had never anticipated. There was bargaining, haggling, the angry shaking of fragile plastic wares and the wrenching of wrinkled chicken throats, the caressing of fish on public squares, baritone voices booming out the price of cabbage, the exchanging of worthless currencies on windy outdoor markets against an overcast sky.
Tolstoy tried not to admit his disappointment. He regretted the large billboards, the roads wider than any Austin freeway, the stench of cars that polluted more maliciously than any American SUV. The giggles of the pre-teen girls were just as shrill, the thrasonical boomings and shoulder-hunched grunts of pubescent males just as vulgar and pretentious as their American analogues. There was a scent in the air of Vladivostok that Tolstoy found cheap and corrosive. It was a curious cross between dollar store perfume and industrial waste. Loud and cheap sounds seemed to be slicing from all directions of the compass, even from the east.
Tolstoy wandered along the docks, sought consolation from the invasive noise and the shrill commercial colors in the view of the rich and endless blue of the Pacific. There were massive ships being loaded on the dock, palls of crusty coal smoke being pooped into the air, weapons systems sent off to banana republics, plutonium exports to landlocked desert countries (the ship was just a way of covering it all up). There were sailors, military men that looked like Popeye with anchor tattoos on their biceps, lounging about the docks, leaning against walls in uniform like in a black and white photo from the forties, cigarette resting serenely in their smiling mouths. Tolstoy approached their coterie and stood as close as possible without invading the intimacy of their marine agape. They were laughing about a popular Russian television personality, apparently some kind of stand-up comedian, and this disappointed Tolstoy. Sailors were supposed to talk in long and nostalgic sentences, as in a Conrad novel. They were supposed to sip whisky and exhale smoke in dim light, spin yarns of intrepid sea feats, shipwrecks averted, typhoons evaded, tsunamis suffocated.
Tolstoy walked away sadly. A sea gull took a nosedive and unleashed its capricious bowels, hit him on the nose with a smart bomb shit. He felt terminated, dirty, and used. Part of him wanted to jump into the water and drown.
He abandoned the idea of winding through Vladivostok on foot, looking on awestruck at the noble way of Russian life. There was no nobility in the palls of industrial ylem, nor in the garish trumpet sounds of motorcycle horns that split through his head like lightning bolts. And yet, Vladivostok had never been the goal, only a means to that end. He was, he had to admit, not much closer to Yasnaya Poliana and to his personal destiny here than he had been back in Austin.
So he bit his lip and made haste through the haze and the noise. The sun had begun to set behind the concrete blocks, and a stiff wind was blowing against his face. He mastered his surroundings, ignored the motorcycle growls, the lewdness of the women’s persiflage, the threats of the insane. And the patience paid off. In the dim light of a dying day, he could make out the letters, not yet awakened by neon charges. Vakzal. The train station. It was here that he would board the famous train and travel across Asia to Europe.
And so it was. A modest price was paid. Large bills were counted off to an eager, round-faced lady of Asiatic origins with a down-home smile that was uncannily Wisconsonian. A ticket was obtained that would send Tolstoy in monotonous juts across the unending pine forests of Siberia, a fortnight of train travel, interrupted only for long pisses in the thick morning fog in towns more remote than anyplace in Texas.
Ticket crumpled tight in his moist hand, Tolstoy loitered a bit in the train station. Vulture-faced police passed with large dogs and gave him a good sniff, the men that is. He wandered about, cast suspicious glances in all directions, feared retribution from the city that he did not want to accept. Hunger began to raise havoc inside his belly, and so he approached a blind man with a large spoon, something resembling chili spurting up in a pot, and wads of stale bread to pour his meaty sauces onto. He ordered this, something resembling a Sloppy Joe with an exotic, Finno-Ugric name. Peppery sauce squirted on his beard as he bit into the heaps of bread and flesh, chomping loudly and exhaling through the nose, and yet this eating was for the hunger that was coming.
Five hours later he was alone in his berth, a Russian newspaper folded over him like an uncomfortable blanket. Night had fallen and he could feel his body swaying gently to and fro as the train obediently ran its course. Tolstoy found it difficult to find sleep’s solace on this. Thick inside his chest, he felt his heart beating to curious rhythms. And there were the surges of pain, the intermittent spurts that hounded him when he feared them most. He tried reading his newspaper, running his eyes over the lines of Cyrillic. In working his eyes and trying to fix his concentration on the subject matter, namely the trivial happenings of Siberia’s lost villages, Tolstoy sought some consolation from the droning of death in his ears, that ringing that intensified the more he thought of it. In all of the matter-of-fact reporting of heroic schoolteachers battling blizzards to make literate her fellow village-dwellers, in all of the vivid accounts of slain wolves by eager, half-drunken and likely fully rabid hunters, Tolstoy could find little that eased his mind.
His mouth grew dry, painfully so. He found himself dreaming strange dreams, waking intermittently and feeling fragile, indeed intensely vulnerable in his berth. He sought to put a positive spin on things, to imagine in the rhythmic movements of the train the rocking of an infant’s cradle by a loving mother. He sought to reconstruct those moments he shared as an infant with Maria Ivanovna. He saw himself with her and traveling across the Atlantic on a steamer, from Petersburg to Havana. He tried to reconstruct in his mind the soft and inviting features of her face, the warm dimples and modest smile, the golden hair parted in the middle, the large blue eyes that reflected love and generosity.
He opened his eyes again and pressed his face to the window. He was somewhere in the unfathomable thickness, invisible to the light of civilization, and this idea brought solace to him. Tolstoy appreciated the idea that he was no longer relevant as an individual, that he had been subsumed by a blackness, veering through night in parts of the world that no one really knew, quietly onwards towards a final destination.
Throughout the two week journey across Siberia, day and night merged into a oneness for Tolstoy, a haziness of consciousness. His existence was now sliced up into a montage of images, alterations of darkness and light and states somewhere in between, drowsy states of semi-consciousness punctuated by flashes of unmitigated intellectual energy. The dreams that Tolstoy had assumed a greater pictorial resolution during the journey, like an upgraded computer program, and yet his perception of the exterior world became hazier. At times, he spent hour after hour staring out the train window, his sad, dark eyes submitting to the stream of green and red of the forests. And yet, as this stream pressed onward, Tolstoy began to sense time drawing to a halt, felt his heart slowing down, his breaths deeper and richer, a calmness setting in over his limbs and his mind, allaying his frantic fears. He had never felt so wise, so ready to die.
